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Scott-Coe's Essay

I certainly agree with both Hawhee and Fitzgerald that it's time to push Burke's RHETORIC OF RELIGION more into the mainstream, not just for its insight into the forms of language (it's surely gotten its share of attention, within Burke studies, on that score), but also for its shrewd commentary on the imperatives of human nature. At the panel on Burke and education at NCA last month, Robert Wess raised the question of why there's so much religiosity in the air right now. The woman sitting next to him on the plane (I think it was) reading her Bible, among other mainifestations of Christian faith to cross his path, apparently filled him with wonder and trepidation. Where's all this presumptive fanaticism---the gist of Bob's inquiry---coming from in this enlightened day and age? I responded with Burke's definition of logology---the systematic study of theological terms for the light they may throw on the forms of language---with its implicit assertion that theological concepts and beliefs will surely be with us always, even unto the end of the age.

I should have gone further with that thought, however. It's Burke's philosophy that can explain the recrudescence of Fundamentalism in our time, not any positivism, empiricism, or scientism. From a scientistic standpoint, red-state revulsion at rampant sexuality and secularism in our popular culture is inexplicable. To a modernist, maybe even postmodernist, mindset, liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick's naive prediction of 75 years ago would make eminent sense: Someday everybody's going to think like me. The dictates of the hortatory negative and its perfectionist residues will be rescinded. Under the irresistible weight of scientific demystifications, religion, except in its etiolated mainstream forms, will wither.

In my view, Scott-Coe brilliantly brings these issues to the fore once again. She makes Burke's inherently theological system (well, Chesebro called it a System in the title of HIS book) stand out clearly, figure/ground, in apt comparison with Augustine and counterpositioning with Ramus. Was Burke a theologian, and if so, what kind? Scott-Coe offers some neat stuff in partial answer to that query. (A definitive answer is not in the offing to that, as well as many other, questions about Burke and his philosophy.)

I hope to get to some of this neat stuff in later posts. If I can find them in my deep files, I might share, also, a couple of Burke's epistolary answers to my claim that he was, in fact, a theologain of a kind.

Poet, then actor, then theologian---aren't those the metaphors Burke proposed, in serial progression, for the symbol-using animal?

If you dare, tell me that's not so.

Taxonomy upgrade extras:

The semester's over, grades are in, and it's time to get back to Scott-Coe's perceptive comparison of Burke to Augustine. Surely, the manner in which they both conflated, her term, theology and rhetoric vouchsafes the validity of her analogy. Augustine's trinitarian use of the three traditional offices of rhetoric (persuasion, pleasure, and provision of instruction) and modes of proof (logos, pathos, and ethos) dovetails nicely with Burke's logological focus on religion's profound use of the hortatory negative, strictly enforced thou-shalt-nots, motive of perfection, compulsive thrust upward toward an overarching god-term (always perfected by way of a God-term, upper case), and disorder-guilt-redemption cycle of social interactions that serve, for good and/or ill, as life's Iron Law of History. The difference, it seems to me, is that Augustine, by and large, comes at theology from the perspective of rhetoric, whereas Burke tends more to come at rhetoric from the angle or view of theology. (Not that these overall trajectories aren't clear enough in Scott-Coe's piece.) One way or the other, as Scott-Coe says, An ultimate reciprocity between theological convention and linguistic terms obtains in the work of both thinkers.

The question for us is, what was Burke really up to in his melding of theology and the structures and inherent impulses of language-use? Or, if that query gets us too far into the veritable black box of a human mind, then what are the implications of Burke's apparently theological philosophy? We know for sure what Augustine had in mind, among possibly other things: the exploitation of pagan or secular terms, concepts, and associations to further a Christian rhetorical appeal, as our commentator puts it. Burke claimed no such Transcendental Purpose (put in the upper case), in fact denied that logology had anything directly to do with religion, theistic belief, or pious living in the ordinary sense of that ubiquitous Burkean term. Burke said he was an agnostic, more than one of his acquaintances has reported. Logology's bottom line, if there is one, comes in the last codicil of Burke's Definition of Man [sic]: The symbol-using [and] -misusing animal is rotten with perfection, the theological motive of perfection being the very driving force at the core of language-charged human life. The motive that forces to the surface thoughts of the ultimately perfect Being of negative theology---Infinite, Eternal, Almighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, etc.---is, at base, the same drive that is threatening the ecosystems of planet Earth, Burke's bete noir as early as CS and P&C.

What gives, then, with Burke's theological obsessions, his relentless need for God talk way above and beyond the explanatory requirements of a pure logologer? More than one Burkean exegete has taken notice of these obsessions, as well as Burke's recurrent tendency to take the side of religion in discussions of its conflicts with secularism and science. Scott-Coe cites, in particular, Wayne Booth's take on the matter. Booth called Burke a theologian and prophet, based on his vast correspondence with our sage and leader.

What should we make of all this? What does Scott-Coe make of it?

She offers no easy, shall we say Ramistic or categorical, answers. She notes the apparently paradoxical motives of logology. But she is certainly right on when she says that there are no easy ways to separate the theological from the linguistic implications of these interests, despite what we might identify as Burke's persistent 'disclaimers.'

More on the subtle, well-phrased, and well-taken argument in Scott-Coe's article anon.

Among the many provocative statements Scott-Coe makes, I'll use this one as jumping-off point here: I find it helpful to see Burke's work as an 'ecumenism' between rhetoric and dialectic, the sacred and the secular, between content and form, serving simultaneously linguistic and religious ends. It is well-taken and consistent with the passage of hers I quoted above about how logology and theology in Burke are not easily separable. In fact, as Scott-Coe notes, logology evinces connections with gnosticism, where both systems see the Divine inside the human, inextricable from it. As Burke says in the intro to RR, the theological motive of perfection is necessarily present even in language used trivially.

This gnostic perspective on Burke has more than one facet, I do believe. The Divine essence, spirit, or pneuma that the gnostics saw as entrapped or imprisoned in the psycho-physical nature of man and woman is, it is true, analogous to the Infinite-Negative intuition that undergirds humankind's fitful pilgrimage along the Upward Way toward Divine enlightenment. That gnostic sense of radical Fallenness has its analogue also, I think, in Burke's scheme of things. Only, for Burke, that descent or (partial?) entrapment isn't wrought by body or cosmos, but rather by language, its selective and deflective myopia, and the molecular rigidities or pieties, our preferred terminological linkages, by which our social and political orientations confront ever-changing environmental conditions with trained incapacities. Burke's philosophy exudes, it seems to me, a radical sense of the Fall. not altogether unlike that of gnosticism in intensity.

Then, too, there is that mutual devotion to an Upward Way, a hierarchy of beings and values, a development and ramification of concepts that adumbrates semi-divine powers of creation within language itself. For the gnostics, it's the Pleroma with its many Aeons subordinate to the true, unknown, and hidden High God Himself, best referred to in negative terms. Beneath these Worthies are the fearsome Archons, offspring of the evil Demiurge that created this problematic universe, inhabitants of the planets above, sentinels on guard to arrest the Divine Light (read: spirit) of the uninitiated, as it tries to ascend to its Heavenly home after death. Burke's obsession with hierarchies and their ubiquitous manifestations in human life and thought hardly needs mention.

The need for gnosis central to this ancient religion has its counterpart in Burke as well. Salvation came to believers through understanding, via verbal instruction, of the ultimate sources of human bondage and the linguistic formuli that could finesse their spirit through the gauntlet of Supernatural Enemies it would meet on its upward flight. Salvation, Burke-style, comes in part through perspective by incongruity, verbal atom-smashing, and most particularly through reorientation via the paradox of purity, change wrought by reidentification from above. Some higher order of abstraction, not unlike the gnosis of long ago, places symbol-users in a startlingly new context in which they see themselves, to borrow Nietzsche's term, as an average. This new situation serves as motive for change.

One more possible similarity might provoke contention and debate. . Gnosticism was nihilistic in respect to this world and humankind's predicament within it. Recall how Burke characterizes his philosophy at the end of GM: He calls it NeoStoic. Stoicism was, for the Ancients, just a slightly milder form of Cynicism, the intensely nihilistic and iconoclastic orientation begun by Diogenes of Sinope at the time of Aristotle. I think Burke takes a pretty pessimistic view of the being he characterizes as rotten with perfection.

Now, when I say Burke's dramatism/logology is nihilistic, somewhat like ancient gnosticism, I mean it has a streak of nihilism in it. As in respect to most things, Burke is both-and here rather than either/or. His text is comedy; his subtext, tragedy. His prescription centers in slap-on-the-wrist instruction and correction of the clown (with, perhaps, the establishment of some social distance for a limited period of time), but his description so often laments seemingly ever-recurrent, severe punishment, banishment, or death to the enemy. Burke's climactic characterization of human symbolic action in GM features the disease metaphor. He urges constant hypochondriasis on his readers, morbid vigilance in respect to the intrinsic morbidities of symbol-use. As I said, his bottom line focuses on humankind's dramatic rottenness, not their hierarchal glories. Their wondrous technological rationality, late Burke opines, is driven by irrational compulsions that, in tar-baby fashion, might even someday lunarize their life and landscape.

Getting back to the expressly theological dimensions of dramatism/logology, Scott-Coe's explicit concern, not that the rant above doesn't relate to it:

In a footnote, Scott-Coe says, Appel himself eventually argues that Burke's dramatism is ultimately negative, and that therefore 'religious people should approach dramatism with caution.' I should have modified that statement a bit in the article she refers to. Orthodox Christian believers should approach dramatism/logology with caution. I offered in that piece that Burke's philosophy/theology is something of a quasi-gnostic universalism friendly to process theology. Process theologians need not qpproach Burke with caution, nor Unitarian Universalists, nor liberal religionists in general. Burke's thought is not incompatible with theism any more than those bleak and pessimistic varieties of gnosticism were in the first few centuries of our era. What Burke appears to deconstruct, or cast doubt on, to use Derrida's term loosely, is the Christian drama or any such transcendental account of disorder-guilt-sacrifice-and-redemption. Such speculations would seem to be a perfected transcendental projection of the generic human drama. Even Burke's cryptic aspersions on the embarrassments of superdrama at the conclusion of GM can be finessed by the refinements of process theology, wherein God is seen as bipolar---transcendent and imminent, eternal and temporal, infinite and finite.

One way or the other, Burke's reputed personal skepticism is negatied by the internal dynamics of his philosophy: Teleology, transcendence, and perfectionism of some valence or variety are inevitable. Even determinism implies a determiner (GM). God-terms of a thoroughly mundane kind can never ultimately satisfy the symbol-using animal. As Burke says, God [and, eventually, at the climax of the development, the god-term] is general AND personal (RM, I believe). Wayne Booth and the rest of us, including Scott-Coe, who have argued for appreciation of the theological implications of Burke's work have made a strong case, I do believe---despite Burke's persistent demurrers.

I'll get to some of those demurrers later, if I can cull them from deep within my files.

When I say that the implications of Burke's dramatism/logology tend to deconstruct the Christian drama, I'm not ascribing to Burke's system apodictic certainty in the matter. God is a mystery (or, if you prefer, God is a mystery). The Transcendental realm Burke calls God in RM---Burke says there that it exists, God exists, in our mind by dialectical necessity---is a mystery. Statements of nonbelief, as well as those of belief, are no less metaphysical conjectures. When they assert that life forms arose and evolved on this planet altogether by accident, Darwinians can't actually know that. Thoroughly unemergent, anti-teleological evolutionism is every bit a matter of faith as Creationism's new tack, intelligent design. Deconstructors see through a glass (filter, lens, frame, template, guiding vector, screen, lamination) darkly, too.

On the issue of evolution and possible imperatives in the structure of life forms themselves---if I'm not getting too far afield here---an acquaintance of mine at the Unitarian Universalist church I attend had some pertinent things to say in an article of his in the journal SCIENCE (19 May, 2000, Vol. 288, pp. 1239-1242). He is Roger D. K. Thomas, John Williamson Nevin Professor of Geosciences at Franklin & Marshcll College. The essay is entitled, Evolutionary Exploitation of Design Options by the First Animals with Hard Skeletons (coauthored with Rebecca M. Shearman and Graham W. Stewart). In the piece, Thomas et al. take issue with Thomas's mentor at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould. Thomas put his demurrers and differences this way in a letter he sent me (he had read a theistic sermon I had preached at the church last summer):

This letter is prompted by the thought that you may find the enclosed reprint interesting. I learned a great deal from Stephen Jay Gould. However, we came to differ quite fundamentally on the rules of 'history' and 'constraint' in evolution. For Steve, the accidents of history were central, not incidental. You will see from my own work that, like Peter Atkins, I see the large-scale, long-term patterns of evolution as being much more largely determined by natural laws. However, I must acknowledge that without the accidents of history, there can be no free will. I suspect that this was Steve's underlying motive, perhaps not even fully conscious, for his passionate embrace of the accidents of history.

Gould had given an endowed lecture at UUCL just before his death, as arranged by Professor Thomas. Thomas sent me a tape recording of Gould's quite fascinating talk. I listened to it several times and responded with a five-page letter. That's how we initially got going on this topic. Thomas's take on evolution at least tangentially relates to theology through the question of what's built into material processes in our universe, the accidents of history providing propitious conditions for emergence.

I hope to get to a reductive definition of theism, and some Burke correspondence on these themes, later.

I meant to write roles of 'history' and 'constraint' in that quote from Professor Thomas, not rules.

Here's a reductive definition of theism I think is quite compatible with Burke's dramatism/logology:

Theism is the belief that human personality (let's get more Burkean still and say human symbolism) is in some way rooted in and reflective of---maybe only in some very, very small way reflective of, but still reflective of---the Ground of Being, Creative Source, or Generative Force, not just inanimate matter and blind physical forces (RR, p. 289). It is the belief that human personality is a legitimate part of the universe, not just an accidental excrescence.

This definition makes room for tons and tons of mystery for sure. Like ancient gnosticism, however, it does affirm a kernel of connection and reflection between the inner essence of grievously fallen humankind and the Ultimate Force behind it all. At the outset, there was a Unified Generative Force, right?---that ramified so rapidly into the four forces of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Those four forces have not yet been melded into a unified field theory, though string theory offers some promise of doing so. Theism is the belief that symbol-using creatures were implicit in, let's just say potentially present in within, not categorically excluded from, that initial Creative Event. Gnosticism serves well as mythical metaphor for the distance between ourselves and the unfathomed God as the beloved cynosure and sinecure of all desire (the climax of RR, p. 333).

Yet, since the matter that comprises us is but frozen energy, whether in the form of infinitesimally tiny strands, strings, or membranes or not, that Generative Force is very much with us and inside us (as in process theology, wherein the Divine is conceive of as both transcendent and immanent).

Well, as the Stage Manager says in OUR TOWN after his introduction to the weddin', that's my sermon. Twan't much.

So, I sent Burke a letter and a paper of mine in late 1983 that set forth some of the reasons I claimed he was a theologian. He replied in the negative. I then sent him another long letter developing my case even further. Burke responded again, apparently still not convinced. I wrote one more time, then saw and talked to him at the Burke Conference in Philadelphia in March of 1984. The second day of the conference, I walked into the ballroom at the Bellevue-Stratford and was accosted by Herb Simons. Herb said to me that Burke had mentioned me in a conversation the night before, a confab that included KB, Bruce Gronbeck, Herb, and some other luminaries. Herb said that Gronbeck had asked Burke during the exchanges, Are you a theologian? (I was in Bruce's seminar and must have introduced the subject.) Burke's reply, according to Simons, was, Well, Ed Appel has made a powerful argument that I am.

Needless to say, that made my day and my conference.

Here's the first of those two replies I received from KB, dated November 24, 1983:

Dear Mr. Appel

Your MS recd. I'll be a while getting around to it. But a glance at your letter suggests that you might read my letter to the editor in the London TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT of August 12 (anent 'Dramatism and Logology'). I think that my analogizing of Dramatism with Ontology and Logology with Epistemology might be useful. Also, the two definitions of the term 'logology' in the OED. Or for a first rough approximate: Theology wd. pronounce the term with the accent thus: 'words about GOD,' logology wd. accent it: 'WORDS about 'God.' And in Dante's set-up, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise would each have its particular kind of 'perfection.' Perhaps, if any of this suggests a modification of your position, you might write me a page or so to that effect, before I read your pages.

Best wishes, K. Burke

None of that suggested a modification of my position, so I wrote Burke, at length, again. Here's what he had to say in reply:

January 9, 1984

Mr. Edward C. Appel 69 Hickory Lane Leola, PA 17540

Dear Mr. Appel,

You have done plenty of conscientious, observant work on your presentation. Yet I do believe the whole issue can be reduced to a few basic points.

First, Logology my style is in line with William James on 'the will to believe.' Though one might PERSONALLY be a theist or an atheist, my analysis of how the WORD 'God' behaves can provide no such judgment. You undertake to show how it fits if the term refers to an actual entity so called.

Two, since I claim that it should fit, be there or be there not a God, I 'naturally' welcome your testimony to the effect that you find my analysis in keeping with a belief in God.

Three, how outright, downright atheists might respond I don't yet know. But with those who are agnosltics or tepidly along the slope of disbelief, I mostly confront comments to do with the sheer dialectics of the case.

But in all fairness I should point to this consideration with regard to the 'principle of perfection.' Logology uses the term not just 'straight,' but IRONICALLY. Satan in his way is as 'perfect,' as 'to the end of the line,' as God. Hell is as 'perfect' as Heaven. I 'gin fear that, in o'er-desecularizing my logological involvements with the negative, you will 'prove' me to be a Manichee, with Mephisto as real as the Logos.

Sincerely,

Kenneth Burke

[P.S.] Regretably, my trip South [Burke was at Emory University as I recall] involved quite a scrambling of my material - and I'm beginning to conclude that your pages are not with me, for a final check. So I must be frank about this matter. But I cannot see how the issue would be otherwise than I have summed it up. A believer's ATTITUDE towards a divine entity is EMPIRICALLY REAL whether there is or is not such a being.

Right, KB. And your philosophy posits, implies, in effect forcefully argues, that such an attitude will inexerably, relentlessly, empirically bubble to the surface in human life and community in the large whatever the environing conditions or cultural constraints. Freud might call it the return of the repressed. We'll call it, after our favorite philosopher/theologian, the ubiquity and power of the theological motive of perfection.

compulsive thrust upward toward an overarching god-term (always perfected by way of a God-term, upper case), and disorder-guilt-redemption cycle of social interactions that serve, for good and/or ill, as life's Iron Law of History.

We know for sure what Augustine had in mind, among possibly other things: the exploitation of pagan or secular terms, concepts, and associations to further a Christian rhetorical appeal, as our commentator puts it.

I'm not sure I can agree with this as a basic premise. Clearly, in his Confessions, Augustine struggled with rhetoric, likening it to a mistress. Rather than try and use the terms to further a Christian appeal, it seems to me that Augustin tried to applied what he felt wer the keep-able truths in Rhetoric as seen through the frame of his Christian beliefs.

Also,

Burke said he was an agnostic, more than one of his acquaintances has reported. Logology's bottom line, if there is one, comes in the last codicil of Burke's Definition of Man [sic]: The symbol-using [and] -misusing animal is rotten with perfection, the theological motive of perfection being the very driving force at the core of language-charged human life. The motive that forces to the surface thoughts of the ultimately perfect Being of negative theology---Infinite, Eternal, Almighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, etc.---is, at base, the same drive that is threatening the ecosystems of planet Earth, Burke's bete noir as early as CS and P&C.

What gives, then, with Burke's theological obsessions, his relentless need for God talk way above and beyond the explanatory requirements of a pure logologer? More than one Burkean exegete has taken notice of these obsessions, as well as Burke's recurrent tendency to take the side of religion in discussions of its conflicts with secularism and science. Scott-Coe cites, in particular, Wayne Booth's take on the matter. Booth called Burke a theologian and prophet, based on his vast correspondence with our sage and leader.

It seems to me that Booth may just be correct in his estimation of Burke. He was a theologian and prohpet, or a coy theologian as described by Ed Appel, if one interprets his logology in such a way to include the argument of prime mover. In spite of his self-proclaimed agnosticism, he argued persuasively concerning the definition of man, in particularly as rotten with perfection. The often unconscious drive toward final cause combined with a relentless fascination and construction of religion would seem a compelling argument to the existence of prime mover. That, along with Burke's continued discussion of god-terms. Why? He himself it seemed, could not drown out the drive toward the Ultimate.

I'm not sure that Burke was an intentional theologian, but surely does much to advance the knowledge of the Absolute through the borrowing of religious terms used in secular way. Hence, the word coy aptly describes his status as a theologian.

Thanks for encouraging this conversation, Ed. When life gets too busy to enter into such stimulated, excellent discourse with peers and friends, then life... is too busy.

As for exactly how Augustine employed secular rhetorical theory in the development of his Christian theology, or employed it in a strategy of religious appeal, I'm going to leave that issue to Scott-Coe to refine, if she cares to enter the fray.

In addition, Stephanie stated, in respect to Burke:

He himself it seemed, could not drown out the drive toward the Ultimate.

Right. As I mentioned, so many of his interpreters have noted this obsession of Burke's to go way beyond the demands of strictly secular logological explanation in his theological ruminations. As Burke says in the Pure Persuasion section of RM, such concerns are conjured up in language use by dialectical necessity. Imperatives of form hold sway here, regardless of what reality exists or does not exist beyond our symbolic nature.

This is a fascinating interchange, Ed. Your willingness to post it and allow us to analyze and respond is a much appreciated. I just love hearing the actual voice of KB (and my other fave philosopher/rhetoricians) via the medium of personal letter or audio file. THANKS!

This passage struck me in particular:

First, Logology my style is in line with William James on 'the will to believe.' Though one might PERSONALLY be a theist or an atheist, my analysis of how the WORD 'God' behaves can provide no such judgment. You undertake to show how it fits if the term refers to an actual entity so called.

It seems as you developed your case he was more open, but even though he stuck to his guns about his own position, it must be noted that there are many philosophers who don't know they are philosphers. There are artists and writers who do not call themselves by those names. Seems to me that KB was a theologian, but he didn't know it. Perhaps this is the reasoning behind your choice of the adjective, coy?

One other point.

He mentioned James, but I would be more inclined to refer to Kant. Could it be that KB's insight regarding the human drive to perfection and his status of (inadvertant) theologian is much the same as Kant's categorical imperative?

Morality points to the Perfect Moral One.Morality is a distinctly human feature.All humans experience a latent morality.Only an absolute Being could engender moral consciousness.THerefore there must be a Perfect Moral One.

I don't have time to expand, but what do you think? Any correlation there?